Toronto > Binbrook > Ottawa > Wakefield > Toronto

Christopher and I had a four-day whirlwind getaway last week.

We started last Sunday by driving to my parents' new house in Binbrook (which is in Stoney Creek, which is in Hamilton). We got there pretty late, so that night we watched TV for a little while and then went to bed.

The next day Christopher made us a fabulous breakfast of bacon-and-fried-eggs-and-cheese-on-English-muffins (such a fabulous breakfast, in fact, that I demanded he recapitulate it mere days later...). Then we went to two malls, and I bought a suit (blue pinstripes!).

This was followed by a family birthday gathering at my Aunt's house, at which I watched my first ever episode of Canadian Idol.

Waking up the next day, we drove to Ottawa. We checked into the Bostonian, which was reasonably priced and perfectly located (thanks, expedia.ca!). We went out for Thai (the Green Papaya - on Queen, west of Bank St - the curry I had was very different and not bad...I don't like it when I have to pay for steamed rice to go wth my curry, though...do they think anyone is going to eat the curry without rice?) and then headed to the Market to see what we could see. I had a beavertail and then we went to a mediocre bar for a pitcher of cider.

Before we left Toronto, we had seen on the internet that there was a bar called Swizzles in Ottawa that offered, on Tuesdays, two things that Christopher and I enjoy: gaity and karaoke. We weren't sure after dinner whether it was best to try to track down that bar, or to just wander around and look for the fun.

I don't know how many times it will take us to learn this, but there's not that much fun in Ottawa. Even in the Market, which was at least populated (last time we were in Ottawa, there was a night when we couldn't find one inhabited pub on Elgin or Bank...), things were weird and not too exciting. The highlight may have been when two women insisted we go to a certain [straight] strip club (Mink? Minx? I can't remember...) as they pressed flyers into our hands; apparently my boyfriend and I aren't flaming enough to avoid such advances....

Having, after our pitcher, exhausted the charms of the bar we found by just wandering around, we decided that Swizzles would be the best option. We sought the place blindly for a bit and then decided to actually look up the address; cabbing back to Queen St, we found that it was literally underneath the restaurant at which we'd had dinner.

There's something seedy or not-quite-right about Gay Ottawa; it's very different from here in Toronto. Swizzles is a bar with little signage that you would miss if you didn't have the address (we did). The space looks like a rec room that badly needs a reno, and the crowd was (save us) all regulars. We stayed for two drinks and then called it a night. (The one plus of Swizzles: an adorable boy wearing a visor who sang a country song and was the most enthusiastic and happy person there...he was fun to watch.)

The next morning we made a quick trip to a really good (though stodgy) used book store called the Book Bazaar (on Bank St) - I bought a copy of Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind, which apparently tells the story of the conflict between Isherwood's "[rage] against...the heterosexual dictatorship" and "his support of a majority cause, the Popular Front against Fascism" - and then we drove to Wakefield.

We went to stay at a friend-of-a-friend's cottage, on a lake outside of town. Emerging from the car, the smell of not-in-a-city-nor-near-a-highway was overwhelming. We spent that day drinking beer, snacking, and playing board games.

The next day we went into Wakefield (after round two of the bacon-egg-cheese muffins), which is a charming looking town. It's very, very small, and has several bars, some cute shops, a grocery store stocked with good Québécois beer (which I'm drinking as I write this), and a really good bakery. Wakefield also seems to be a bilingual town, which kind of surprised me. Sure, it's only 20 minutes outside Ottawa, but I thought that actual bilingualism was something that was an attribute of larger cities, not small hamlets. I figured, I guess, the smaller the town, the more homogenous the culture. I think I'm wrong.

On the way back from town, we stopped at a little station that has been built around a natural spring, where we filled up our bottles of water. I'm trying to think of how to express why this was delightful, but I'm having trouble.... Anyway, I liked it.

After our trip to Wakefield, we went back to the cottage and took the pontoon boat out onto the lake, wherein we swam.

And thence back to Toronto.

It was a lot for four days, and I didn't get any of the reading or writing done that I'd thought I might, but it was a good time all the same. Going to a new place each day certainly made the time seem longer. And it's good to get out of the City every once in a while.

PS Wakefield has a covered bridge, which we drove through. Hooray!